by Writing Workshops Staff
2 hours ago
“…our love still exists and can grow through the imperfect.”
— Michaell Crews-Yancey, “At a Crossroad,” Tiny Love Stories, The New York Times
On August 12, 2026, The New York Times published “At a Crossroad,” a Tiny Love Story by Michaell Crews-Yancey. It also ran in print, in the Sunday Styles section, alongside that week’s Modern Love essay.
The Tiny Love Stories form gives a writer roughly one hundred words. There is no room to build toward anything. Crews-Yancey opens hers inside a small act of caregiving: washing her husband’s feet, his paralyzed legs, a question he asks with trepidation, and the reader understands the marriage before a single fact about it has been supplied. What follows compresses a failed divorce and its undoing into two lines of dialogue that answer each other. It is a hard thing to do in a hundred words and a harder thing to do about your own life. She does both without reaching for a single soft phrase.
Michaell, Mickey to the people who have sat in workshop with her, has been writing toward this for a while. She enrolled in her first class with us in November 2021, a one-day seminar that December, and has since enrolled in seminars and workshops and joined us on writing retreats. The early ones were essay foundations: Introduction to Personal Essay with Diana Spechler in the winter of 2022, then Advanced Personal Essay that spring. After that came a long run of craft work — scene-making in personal narrative, show-don’t-tell, an intensive on Finding Your Voice, then fiction technique in memoir. In 2025 she spent six weeks in a poetry workshop on grief. Compression has been on her mind for some time.
She has come to us in person, too: the Mackinac Island retreat in 2023, and a year-long memoir and essay collection incubator that began in January 2024.
Then, in the fall of 2025, something in her practice turned toward the outward-facing part of the work. She took a seminar on literary magazine submissions in November and one on the query letter in December. In April 2026, she came to New York for our New York Publishing Workshop, where she worked in the nonfiction cohort with St. Martin’s editor Kevin Reilly.
When she wrote to tell us about the Times, she put the sequence plainly: “I started to submit more pieces when I got home.” That is the whole mechanism, and it is not a mysterious one. She learned where to send things, she wrote something true and very short, and she sent it.
She is not stopping there. “I’m in the process of working on the book proposal now,” she wrote. Five years of essay craft, a year inside a memoir incubator, a poetry workshop on grief, and a publishing retreat all point in the same direction, and the hundred words in the Times read like a piece of something larger that already exists. We’re glad to have been one of the rooms she has written in, and we’ll be watching for the book.
Every writer’s path looks different, but they tend to share the same ingredients: a community that reads your work closely, instructors who have done the thing they’re teaching, and enough time at the desk for the work to change. You’ll find all of it in our online creative writing workshops, alongside writers publishing in The New York Times, literary magazines, and their own first books. If the personal essay is calling to you, our nonfiction classes are a good place to begin. Your story is already yours. We’d be glad to help you find its shape.
